A LONG article by Ellen Barry in The New York Times examines efforts by male elders in a small Indian village to keep some women from working in local factories. It’s an interesting, meticulously-reported piece, an exposé of primitive patriarchy in a small corner of the world where the misogynistic men would rather be poor than have their women leave home for paying jobs in smelly factories.

These men are clearly doomed.

The women in dispute had previously earned money by begging. They accept jobs in meat-packing factories. The ringleader of the group is a model of feminine affability, just the sort of woman the Times envisions as modernizing this backward land.

Geeta, the younger of the two, was born angry. Even as a child, if her siblings took her portion of food, she was apt to throw everyone’s dinner into the dirt. “A real bastard-woman,” one neighbor called her, eyes widening with admiration.

“Let their ladies sit and cook for them,” Geeta would hiss to her friend Premwati, as they walked together past their neighbors. “Our husbands are with us.”

[…]

“Her husband is like a chicken — if she tells him to get up, he will get up!” chuckled the chief in the town where she grew up.

I bet she’s a good cook too.

The village has traditionally looked down on women working side by side with strange men. One of the male elders orders that the women be shunned and everyone in the village complies. Much drama results, the sort of thing that could only occur in a place where, bizarrely, everyone knows everyone else.

The Times does not like the fact that the labor force participation rate of women in India has fallen (it now stands at a low 27 percent). In India’s cities many women work in jobs. But two Harvard professors, writing in the editorial pages last August, recommended that women be dragged from their homes and forced to accept paid jobs so that India’s traditional values are wrecked and Big Business rules the country impose quotas so that more women are working and the number of employed men is strictly limited:

For India’s government to maintain the country’s progress into the ranks of middle-income countries, it needs to understand why female labor force participation is falling, and develop an effective policy response.

Data shows a complex and puzzling picture: Women are becoming more educated but, simultaneously, the positive labor market effects typically associated with higher education are declining.

It’s not that women don’t want to work. Our analysis of data from India’s latest labor survey shows that over a third of women engaged primarily in housework say they would like a job, with that number rising to close to half among the most educated women in rural India. [Then, yes, it is that women don’t want to “work.” Almost two-thirds of the women engaged primarily in housework apparently don’t want a job.]

Much of the reason they don’t work appears to lie in the persistence of India’s traditional gender norms, which seek to ensure “purity” of women by protecting them from men other than their husbands and restrict mobility outside their homes.

The professors, apparently on the payroll of Big Business, say that women who earn money at home are not fully liberated. Home-based labor is not a worthy goal for India:

Home-based wage work or entrepreneurship, even when it exists, rarely transforms and liberates the worker.

If the United Nations has its way, every women in India will have a briefcase or be the president of her own corporation.

Mike King examines Barry’s piece at The Anti-New York Times and writes:

Those poor Indian gals. They are really missing out on the pleasures of hours of long commuting, cubicle confinement, office politics, stress-filled days, deadlines, sexual advances by creepy male co-workers, and coming home late to an empty apartment and a microwave dinner. Whatever the social or work situations regarding women may be in India, the fact is, India is still a much more traditional society than the West — one in which stay-at-home motherhood is not looked down upon by hideous hags like Ms. Barry. To feminists, women are disposable economic units to be herded into the “workforce” and exploited for taxes and “consumption”.

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